Rumors and Reports of Rumors

RUMORS AND REPORTS OF RUMORS....I'm a little torn about whether I should blog more about transition scuttlebutt. On the one hand, this stuff matters a lot for the future course of the administration. If Robert Gates is Secretary of Defense or Tom Vilsack is Secretary of Agriculture, that says a lot about the tone and direction of Obama administration policy.

On the other hand, I'd guess that about 99% of these rumors are completely bogus, just random guesses from people with only a tenuous connection to the transition team. In that sense, reacting to the rumors is just dumb. It's the kind of thing that makes us all stupider, not better informed.

Still, chatting about who might go where, and what it all means, isn't such a bad conversation to have, even if the spark is sort of random and poorly sourced. So I dunno. What do you all think of the possibility of Gates staying on as SecDef or Vilsack being appointed Secretary of Agriculture?